What Cory Doctorow and Seth Godin can teach us about building lasting digital civilizations
Seth Godin recently wrote that we are living in ghost cities — digital metropolises that rise and fall in the span of a few years. From Myspace to Twitter, from Slack to whatever is next, we build vibrant civilizations of communication, commerce, and creativity—only to abandon them when the wind shifts.
In the physical world, cities decayed over centuries. In the digital world, they vanish with a terms-of-service update.
Each collapse leaves behind the same haunting ruins: lost archives, broken links, forgotten relationships, stranded skills. And yet, like digital nomads with collective amnesia, we move on — building the next ghost city, certain this one will last.
But as Godin hints, and Cory Doctorow has argued explicitly for years, this isn’t inevitable. It’s engineered.
The Architecture of Dependency
Doctorow calls it enshittification — the slow rot that sets in when platforms shift from serving users to serving investors. A platform starts off generous, open, and interoperable to attract people. Then, as its network grows, it locks down. APIs close. Data gets trapped. Exits disappear.
The walls go up because captivity is profitable. The cycle is as predictable as entropy:
- Platforms become dominant by giving us freedom.
- They monetize that dominance by taking it away.
- Users leave, and the city dies.
- What looks like “creative destruction” is often just planned obsolescence at planetary scale.
The Politics of Forgetting
Godin’s “digital amnesia” is not just the loss of data — it’s the loss of continuity. When interoperability is denied, memory dies. A new tool means new skills, new logins, new social graphs. What was once a community becomes an archive no one can open.
Cory Doctorow has been warning about this for decades: without the right to adversarial interoperability — the ability to connect, extract, and rebuild across systems — users are not citizens of the digital world; they are tenants.
And tenants can be evicted.
From Expansion to Stewardship
For half a century, we’ve lived in an age of digital expansion. Each wave doubled our bandwidth, our reach, our time online. But as Godin notes, that curve has hit its limit. We can’t double again. The next challenge isn’t to build bigger networks, but better civilizations within them.
This is the moment to shift from growth to governance. From innovation to preservation.
From platforms to public infrastructure.
In the analog world, we solved this through civic norms — building codes, zoning laws, and property rights. In the digital world, we need their equivalents:
- Open standards as digital zoning laws.
- Data portability as a right of movement.
- Interoperability as the foundation of citizenship.
Information Stewardship: The Missing Discipline
This is where Human-Centered Information Systems must step in. Technology alone won’t fix this — because the problem isn’t technical, it’s architectural and cultural.
We’ve built systems that optimize for engagement, not endurance. We’ve rewarded speed over structure. And we’ve accepted the myth that digital decay is the price of progress.
But civilization, even digital civilization, depends on stewardship — on people who care about continuity, context, and human-scale design.
A world of interoperable, human-centered systems would treat data as civic infrastructure, not private property. It would design for persistence, not churn. It would build tools meant to last long enough to learn from.
The City We Could Build
Imagine if your data, relationships, and work could move freely across systems. If each digital space connected to the next the way streets connect neighborhoods — with standards, not silos.
Doctorow’s interoperability and Godin’s call for digital resilience converge on the same point: the city we need next isn’t another platform, it’s a commons.
A place where creativity isn’t deskilled, memory isn’t erased, and leaving one place doesn’t mean losing yourself.
Of course, it is unrealistic to expect digital platforms to last forever. Nothing does. But it is the old mining mindset at work in a new environment. Extract all the assets and move on leaving the barren landscape behind. We need to think more deeply about the ownership of data and relationships.
The value lives in the connections, not the platform. We need infrastructure that lets relationships persist when platforms don’t.